I was thinking about Ann Coulter today.
Ann Coulter is basically an uglier, less funny Sarah Silverman (a 'comedian' famous for being a nice, pretty Jewish girl who tells very dirty and outrageously racist jokes for the shock value).
It's all shock value, she likes the attention. She is actually very boring. She says nothing new. More after the jump.
An Ann Coulter parody site could predict every utterence from her mouth for the next 6 months just by sitting around and having a brainstorming session. I would not be surprised if she actually had a team of writers who sat around and wrote 'outrageous' remarks for her. In fact, I would bet on it.
There are basically a dozen Coulter sayings:
- [Famous liberal] should be killed. Joking!
- Bush is a genius and the GOP is naturally superior.
- Liberals are angry and irrational.
- All Democrats are traitors/commies/aliens.
- A call for the extermination of Muslims.
- A call for the extermination of Liberals. Joking!
- Howard Dean/The Democratic Party is incompetent.
- Something bad happened somewhere, in the present or in the past. It's due to liberals and liberal policies.
- My book has a lot of footnotes, therefore it is true.
- Ann Coulter is awesome.
- The media is awful and liberal. They don't report on me enough.
- I wish terrorists had killed my enemies when they attacked.
Have you EVER seen her say anything else? She is supposedly a Yale-educated lawyer. Yet she offers nothing beyond a few set stock phrases. Her latest is yet another remix of phrase #1.
She is really an unfunny standup comedian, but her genius is to hinge it on a 'conservative' shtick so that she can get funding and sell books. She has almost no competition in this category. Note how Coulter almsot never offers policy, prediects elections, etc. That's all trivial and distracts from the 'edginess'. It's 100% rants and aggression from her.
I'm also convinced a large portion of her audience is outraged liberals who watch and read her just to get angry. How many diaries will there be on her today?
Did anyone notice her latest appearance was at a Historically Black College? Why would she go somewhere where she was almost guaranteed to get a hostile reaction? To discuss issues? No, to get publicity for her comedy.
I would predict that sometime in the next couple of years there will be a younger, prettier competitor. There is probably room for only one 'sexy' angry Conservative woman. Coulter is already pushing 40. This competitor will begin by ATTACKING COULTER then saying WORSE stuff. Why does Opie & Anthony attack Howard Stern on the air and hold sex competitions in churches (something Howard Stern would never stoop to)? Same reason - free publicity for the new kid that pushes the envelope.
I know her remarks today will unleash a predictable stream of tirades about how she is awful. I'm not sure her activities represent anything more than the American tendency to poke a finger in the eye of the mainstream. Politicians rushing to be photographed with her and seeking her endorsement is a bad sign. Her constantly getting heckled (and today it looks like ON PURPOSE) is concern only for her publicist and agent.